Between the queen’s diamond jubilee celebration in June and the Olympic Games that began Friday, it has been a banner year for British memorabilia.

Sixteen dollars, more or less, will buy you a gelatin dessert mold in the shape of Elizabeth II’s head. For about $2,440, you can furnish your bedroom with a handmade jubilee mattress covered in a Union Jack pattern. And for about $40,500, or best offer on eBay, you can accessorize your living room with an “official” London Olympics torch carried by one of 8,000 runners in the weeks leading up to the Games.

Then, there are the mass-produced trinkets that make up almost all of the estimated $1.5 billion industry of London Olympics souvenirs, from Union Jack bunting to stuffed versions of the Olympics mascot known as Wenlock, a curiously shaped creature with a Teletubby figure and a Cyclops eye.

You wouldn’t know it from the keepsakes crammed into London newsstands, but some of the most memorable designs produced this summer are, in fact, inexpensive souvenirs. They are the objects commissioned by Create, an arts organization in London that asked five designers to propose alternatives to the shoddy mementos, often made overseas, that have flooded the country.

The pieces include Barnaby Barford’s porcelain house modeled on the Blind Beggar pub in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, Andre Klauser’s miniature cast-iron mooring post and Ed Carpenter’s enameled pins printed with Cockney slang.

All are tokens of East London, where the Olympic Park is stretched out on a piece of land much bigger than Hyde Park. Create’s director, Hadrian Garrard, calls the area “Europe’s largest cultural quarter,” basing his claim on an estimated 13,000 artists there.

EAST LONDON SHOWCASE

Create organizes frequent activities in this community that have nothing to do with souvenirs. But as the Olympics approached, Garrard thought it fitting to salute a region whose industrial heritage has made it a desert for tourist attractions and souvenirs. (Wealthier areas like the West End of London have epic tourist draws like the Houses of Parliament.)

The project brief stipulated that only designers who lived or worked in East London could contribute. It also required that the souvenirs be “clever, useful and well designed,” as well as “creative, engaging and environmentally sustainable.”

And so Dominic Wilcox’s 10-inch vinyl record preserves the sounds of workers in 21 East London trades, from salmon curing to eyeglass making. (Wilcox chose that format over an MP3 file “because the project is about making,” he said. “You can see the music in the grooves, you can hold it in your hand.”)

And while the Olympics only vaguely underpin four of the designs, they’re directly alluded to in Donna Wilson’s series of “exercise books,” notebooks with a map of East London parks where users can practice sports.

The Create objects are significant because they do the work a souvenir is supposed to do, in terms of encapsulating a place and time. Yet, they are not like the mugs or T-shirts we collect as reminders of historic occasions, prosthetics we depend on to perform feats of memory for us. Instead, they force us to consider what it means to commemorate, and whether the embodiments we choose are really worth the dust they gather on the mantel.

TRIP TREASURES

Souvenir collecting dates at least to the days when medieval pilgrims brought back tokens from their sojourns in holy lands. “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition,” a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition in New York, displayed coinlike terra-cotta disks from the sixth or seventh century, possibly from Syria, that were gathered by pilgrims as remembrances of their encounters with holy men.

Writing about artifacts like these — and bits of earth scraped from Christ’s tomb, and dollops of oil harvested from sacred lamps — the curators noted, “When brought home, these treasures allowed their owners to revisit the sites of their pilgrimage, to be protected by them and to occasion miracles.”

Today, most souvenirs are cheap objects mass produced in Asia. According to The Daily Mail, only 9 percent of the 194 souvenirs offered on the London 2012 website in February were manufactured in Britain; 62 percent were made in China.

But souvenirs also can be expensive items of long-lasting quality, like the Royal Crown Derby Diamond Jubilee tea set, which sells for $930.

Then, there are prideful souvenirs like national flags, and snarky ones like the mold made by the British designer Lydia Leith, which produces a quivering Queen Elizabeth Jell-O head.

The Create objects occupy a completely different category. You could call them precious: Behold the artisanal souvenir, subtly flavored and locally produced in small batches, like mizuna gently raised by an organic farmer. Except that they have robust ideas and forms, and unlike gourmet greens, are reasonably priced: $16 buys you Wilson’s exercise books, and for $23 you can have Carpenter’s Cockney slang pins. If you really want to splurge, Barford’s set of five bone-china houses is about $117. (The items are available at theo-theo.com.)

As Thorsten van Elten, a manufacturer of furniture and accessories who supervised the design and production of the Create souvenirs, explained, “We didn’t want them to be too ironic.” The objects have “more to do with the history and the tradition of East London, which unfortunately gets overlooked.”

In other words, Wilson said, “They had to be viable souvenirs.”

The objects are intended for a broad audience, which also is why they are affordable.

But despite the modest prices, these goods are meant to last. The project recognizes the senselessness of disposable mementos, particularly at a time when so many people are trying to reform their throwaway tendencies.

Reflecting on the masses of Olympics merchandise that will never change hands, van Elten took comfort in the expectation that the Create souvenirs will sell “for months and months” after the Games.

“I’m not one for making things and then having to chuck them out,” he said.

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